Lockheed-Boeing rocket venture cuts 350 jobs

By Irene Klotz

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A rocket company owned by Lockheed Martin and Boeing said on Friday it cut 350 jobs, with another 400 to 500 layoffs expected in 2017.

The staff reductions amount to a quarter of the workforce at United Launch Alliance LLC, the Centennial, Colorado-based company that supplies the U.S. Air Force with Atlas and Delta rockets to launch military and spy satellites into space.

SpaceX, as Musk's privately owned Hawthorne, California-based firm is known, in April broke ULA's 10-year monopoly on military satellite launch contracts with an $83-million Air Force award to deliver a GPS spacecraft into orbit in 2018.

The price for a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch is 40 percent less than what the Air Force expected to pay for a ULA Atlas 5 rocket ride, Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, head of the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, told reporters on a conference call after the contract announcement.

About two-thirds of ULA's layoffs were voluntary, with another 110 workers receiving notice on Thursday of an involuntary layoff, Rye said.